Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [17]
After leaving a secure position as an English teacher at Mississippi State College, to the chagrin of his mother, Lewis, a pragmatist, tried his hand at business, stumbling into advertising, shooting commercials, and eventually making some short, sexually suggestive films whose main purpose was to get scantily clad women to cavort on a beach. Teaming with the producer David Friedman, a Barnum-like promoter with extensive ties to the worlds of freak shows and carnivals, Lewis made several movies in the early sixties featuring topless girls that were part of the genre of “nudie-cutie” movies. When they did so-so business, the duo changed tactics and made a trilogy of movies with women getting limbs chopped off, brains and intestines dribbling out, and blood pouring from open wounds.
Three years after Psycho opened, Lewis presented Blood Feast, a terribly acted horror film made in four days for $24,000 without a script or much of a clue. The main idea was that bathtubs of blood would be spilled in an effort to portray an Egyptian meal cooked with the bodies of virgins and a tongue ripped out of a woman’s mouth. For the watershed last effect, the moon landing for gore films, an actual sheep’s tongue was used. Lewis knew he needed something slithery, disgusting, and real so he imported the body part from Tampa Bay. Everything else in the production was found locally. But Lewis took this tongue very seriously.
Although he did care about a few aesthetic matters—the movie must be in color, the better to see the red blood—Lewis basically made his film based on one principle: show the audience something that they could never see in a mainstream movie. Lewis did not have much talent as a storyteller or a handler of actors (the style varies from effusive hamming to comatose mumbling) or a creator of images or really much of anything having to do with the art of movies. But when it came to really gruesome blood and guts, he had the market almost all to himself. Word got out fast.
On the first night of Blood Feast, thousands of mostly young audiences arrived to a sold-out drive-in in Peoria, Illinois, looking to see something outrageous. The advertisements promising “Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror” got people’s attention—or at least certain kinds of people. “Our audience was ninety percent men,” Lewis says. “If a woman showed up, she was dragged there. Anyone under thirty-five howled with pleasure. Anyone older than fifty-five, simply howled.”
The press took notice. “A blot on the American film industry” roared the Los Angeles Times. Before long, the movie became a hot property. Friedman, who had a background in advertising, upped the ante in his following movies such as Two Thousand Maniacs!, which showed the nipples of a woman cut off, milk dribbling out of the holes in her breasts. It wasn’t the same. The shock was never as great, and Lewis knew he would never get good reviews or a large audience. He would never top that tongue.
At the other end of the artistic spectrum of the low-budget horror genre in the 1960s was the Italian director Mario Bava, the shy son of a cameraman from the silent film era whose stylish movies repeatedly proved the endless variety of startlingly elegant ways you could brutally kill a woman. Bava managed to be artful and gruesomely graphic. “He was the first to be very mean with his horror,” says his son Lamberto, who continued the family business. “The American movies were more fantastic, atmospheric. He got more directly to the point.”
The same year that Blood Feast sickened small-town American movie audiences, The Girl Who Knew Too Much premiered in Italy, inventing the subgenre that would become known as the giallo (meaning yellow),